Schwartz to Publish “Class Divisions on the Broadway Stage”

Michael Schwartz, temporary assistant professor in the Department of Theater and Dance, signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan to write a book on the representation of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) on the American stage. The title will be Class Divisions on the Broadway Stage: The Staging and Taming of the I.W.W., and it is scheduled for publication in early 2014.

The book explores the ways Broadway theater represented, and Broadway audiences responded to, characters identified as I.W.W. members, or “Wobblies.” The I.W.W. was founded in 1905, and was particularly active in organizing strikes and free-speech protests in the years through the First World War.

The works under study in the book include plays by Eugene O’Neill, John Howard Lawson, Maxwell Anderson, and Upton Sinclair.